Written by Erica Petersen // Waiting in Chicago O’hare Airport's international terminal in May 2019, I had no idea what to expect of the upcoming ten weeks. My colleague from the Masters of Public Health program at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I were both nervous and excited as we boarded our flight to Nairobi. The two of us were headed to Maseno, Kenya, a small town on the west side of the country, to assist a local university in conducting a Community Health Needs Assessment under the supervision of a professor who has been doing HIV prevention work in Kenya for over 20 years. Continue reading

Written by Anna Wangen // Who writes the story of "development"? In a sphere that includes everything from high-level international governing bodies to the smallest local NGOs, as well as academics, humanitarian organizations, aid workers and more, the sheer diversity of actors and institutions renders conflicting ideologies, goals, and interests unavoidable. Despite the presence of defined parameters for development work, these frameworks are dictated through mechanisms over-representative of the Global North. Continue reading

Written by Ryan McGuine // In January 2019, I found myself in Haiti's Toussaint Louverture Airport after having overseen the installation of a solar electricity system to provide an orphanage with constant lighting. As someone who made up the career "humanitarian energy engineer" for a job report in high school, I should have been filled with a huge sense of pride. There was indeed some pride, but in truth I felt somewhat more conflicted. Continue reading